Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

There is nothing like a terrorist attack to create the political will for a surveillance state. Alissa J. Rubin reports in the New York Times about a new law in France that would empower the French authorities to monitor people in their homes, cars, and private spaces, as well to bug their computers. “The bill, in the works since last year, now goes to the Senate, where it seems likely to pass, having been given new impetus in reaction to the terrorist attacks in and around Paris in January, including at the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and at a kosher grocery, that left 17 people dead. As the authorities struggle to keep up with the hundreds of French citizens who are cycling to and from battlefields in Iraq and Syria to wage jihad–often lured over the Internet–the new steps would give the intelligence services the right to gather potentially unlimited electronic data. The provisions, as currently outlined, would allow them to tap cellphones, read emails and force Internet providers to comply with government requests to sift through virtually all of their subscribers’ communications. Among the types of surveillance that the intelligence services would be able to carry out is the bulk collection and analysis of metadata similar to that done by the United States’ National Security Agency. The intelligence services could also request a right to put tiny microphones in a room or on objects such as cars or in computers or place antennas to capture telephone conversations or mechanisms that capture text messages. Both French citizens and foreigners could be tapped…. The new law would create a 13-member National Commission to Control Intelligence Techniques, which would be made up of six magistrates from the Council of State and the Court of Appeals, three representatives of the National Assembly and three senators from the upper house of the French Parliament and a technical expert. Any requests to initiate surveillance would have to go through the commission. However, if the commission recommended not to set up the monitoring, it could be overridden by the prime minister.” While the Times article implies that France is ramping up its surveillance as the United States is pulling back, the fact is that the French proposal still puts members of the council of state, the French Court of Appeals, the National Assembly, and the French Senate on the panel that must approve surveillance requests. Compare that group of elected and appointed public servants with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in the United States, which is comprised of eleven unelected district court judges appointed by the Chief Justice of the United States. This reveals that even if the law is passed in France, at least there would be democratic representatives watching over the watchers.

In the Columbia Spectator, Columbia University’s student newspaper, a letter by members of the Multicultural Affairs Advisory Board calls for trigger warnings before teaching Ovid’s Metamorphoses as part of the college’s core curriculum. “During the week spent on Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses,’ the class was instructed to read the myths of Persephone and Daphne, both of which include vivid depictions of rape and sexual assault. As a survivor of sexual assault, the student described being triggered while reading such detailed accounts of rape throughout the work. However, the student said her professor focused on the beauty of the language and the splendor of the imagery when lecturing on the text. As a result, the student completely disengaged from the class discussion as a means of self-preservation. She did not feel safe in the class. When she approached her professor after class, the student said she was essentially dismissed, and her concerns were ignored. Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ is a fixture of Lit Hum, but like so many texts in the Western canon, it contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom. These texts, wrought with histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression, can be difficult to read and discuss as a survivor, a person of color, or a student from a low-income background…. Students need to feel safe in the classroom, and that requires a learning environment that recognizes the multiplicity of their identities.” The medicalization of the language around trauma is confusing this issue, which concerns one thing simply: the infantalization of university students and of the adults around them. College, not to mention life, is a space that challenges us to confront shocking as well as inspiring ideas, images, and people. It is not a safe space, and it cannot be if it is to be a space for thinking.

Photographer Giles Price was in Nepal before last month’s earthquake. His project there has since changed following the natural disaster: “Price photographed Katmandu the morning after the earthquake, assisted by a local reporter named Pradeep Bashyal, who had been with him on Everest. The city is home to more than a million people, and crowds of them had hastily relocated to its open spaces. The quake leveled several centuries-old World Heritage Sites, but many of Katmandu’s modern buildings fared comparatively well. Still, the fear of aftershocks was all-consuming–and warranted. The two tectonic plates whose movement caused the disaster were still lurching and fidgeting, trying to get comfortable again. Within days, there would be 60 more quakes of magnitude 4.1 or greater, and scientists project that this residual shaking could continue for years. ‘Unfortunately, this is simply what earthquakes do,’ one geologist told NPR. Price didn’t intend for his two sets of pictures to go together, but somehow they do. Or at least they grind against each other evocatively, like jagged plates, and never exactly settle. In some, people have trekked far outside the stability of civilization to confront the extremity of nature–as hired guides, or voluntarily, for pleasure and at no small expense. Others show people with comparatively little, who had that stability heaved up from underneath them. Here are people daring to live on a mountain. And here is a mountain of debris, where a moment ago people had dared to live.”

Jed Rakoff takes a look at the American prison system and wonders what, if anything, is working: “This mass incarceration–which also includes about 800,000 white and Asian males, as well as over 100,000 women (most of whom committed nonviolent offenses)–is the product of statutes that were enacted, beginning in the 1970s, with the twin purposes of lowering crime rates in general and deterring the drug trade in particular. These laws imposed mandatory minimum terms of imprisonment on many first offenders. They propounded sentencing guidelines that initially mandated, and still recommend, substantial prison terms for many other offenders. And they required lifetime imprisonment for many recidivists. These laws also substantially deprived judges of sentencing discretion and effectively guaranteed imprisonment for many offenders who would have previously received probation or deferred prosecution, or who would have been sent to drug treatment or mental health programs rather than prison. The unavoidable question is whether these laws have succeeded in reducing crime. Certainly crime rates have come down substantially from the very high levels of the 1970s and 1980s that gave rise to them. Overall, crime rates have been cut nearly in half since they reached their peak in 1991, and they are now at levels not seen in many decades. A simple but powerful argument can be made that, by locking up for extended periods the people who are most likely to commit crimes, we have both incapacitated those who would otherwise be recidivists and deterred still others from committing crimes in the first place. But is this true? The honest answer is that we don’t know.”

In an interview about why he agreed to co-host an event honoring the French humor magazine Charlie Hedbo, Art Spiegelman describes the power of the cartoon: “Cartoons are so much more immediate than prose. They have a visceral power that doesn’t require you to slow down, but it does require you to slow down if you want to understand them. They have a deceptive directness that writers can only envy. They deploy the same tools that writers often use: symbolism, irony, metaphor. Cartoons enter your eye in a blink, and can’t be unseen after they’re seen.” Numerous PEN society members boycotted the ceremony honoring Charlie Hedbo for their courage. As my Bard Colleague Neil Gaiman, who stepped in to co-host the event, said, “I was honoured to be invited to host a table. The Charlie Hebdo cartoonists are getting an award for courage: They continued putting out their magazine after the offices were firebombed, and the survivors have continued following the murders.”

Randolph Lewis considers the delicacy with which documentarian Errol Morris handles his subjects: “Though he is sometimes criticized for not pushing hard enough in his interviews, I think Morris is wise to put people in the center of the frame and let them run their mouths. Maybe I’m letting him off too easy, but I appreciate his willingness to let the story speak for itself without excessive punctuation or a melodramatic 60 Minutes-style confrontation, which is sometimes little more than a phony performance of moral outrage in which someone screams ‘gotcha.’ If Morris doesn’t shout, ‘Robert McNamara is a self-serving war criminal son-of-a-bitch’ in The Fog of War, it’s because he doesn’t need to. Instead, he lays down plenty of rope for the viewer to hang the former defense secretary for his epic miscalculations, or better yet, to hang the system that elevated this blinkered technocrat to the apex of Cold War power. Or, even better still, the film encourages something more than easy denunciation and moral superiority: It invites a humane regard for McNamara’s folly, as if he were a deluded king in Shakespearean tragedy who we can’t quite reject outright. Without in any way excusing what McNamara did, Morris shows an awareness of human frailty and contradiction that we often attribute to great novelists.”

Deborah Rudacille takes a look at the effects of the old American industries on the bodies and minds of those who labored in them, and she wonders why we miss them: “Thousands of working-class communities around the country lament the shuttering of blast furnaces, coke ovens, mines and factories. This yearning for a vanishing industrial United States, a place in long, slow decline thanks to globalisation and technological change, has a name–smokestack nostalgia. It is a paradoxical phenomenon, considering the environmental damage and devastating health effects of many of the declining industries. Our forebears worked gruelling shifts in dangerous jobs, inhaling toxic fumes and particulates at work and at home. Many lived in neighbourhoods hemmed in by industries that pumped effluent into rivers, streams and creeks… Few of the steelworkers I’ve known deny the negative aspects of living and working on the Point, including long-standing racial, class and gender discrimination. Still, they grieve the shuttering of the Sparrows Point works, which provided not just union jobs with generous benefits, but a sense of family and community, identity and self-worth. At a ceremony on 24 November 2014 honouring the legacy and history of Sparrows Point, in advance of the demolition of what was once the largest blast furnace in the western hemisphere, steelworkers described what the Point meant to them. ‘My heart will always be in this place. This is hallowed ground,’ said Michael Lewis, a third-generation steelworker and union officer. Troy Pritt, another steel worker, read a poem calling the steelworks ‘home’.”

This week on the Blog, Kazue Koishikawa challenges us to meditate on how the “political” relates to humanity and to understand why Arendt feels the public realm is diminishing in the Quote of the Week. Lebanese-American poet Khalil Gibran provides this week’s Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, we share a photograph of a Twitter follower’s personal library that includes different translations of many of Hannah Arendt’s works in this week’s Library feature.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Looking for scandal, the press is focusing on the apparent conflict between Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Sonia Sotomayor. But the case of Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action is more important than the scandal. It raises fundamental questions about the democracy, race and the constitution. Sonia Sotomayor, in her dissent, writes: “And race matters for reasons that really are only skin deep, that cannot be discussed any other way, and that cannot be wished away. Race matters to a young man’s view of society when he spends his teenage years watching others tense up as he passes, no matter the neighborhood where he grew up. Race matters to a young woman’s sense of self when she states her hometown, and then is pressed, ‘No, where are you really from?’, regardless of how many generations her family has been in the country. Race matters to a young person addressed by a stranger in a foreign language, which he does not understand because only English was spoken at home. Race matters because of the slights, the snickers, the silent judgments that reinforce that most crippling of thoughts: ‘I do not belong here.'” John Roberts, in his concurring opinion, responds: “The dissent states that “[t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race.” And it urges that “[r]ace matters because of the slights, the snickers, the silent judgments that reinforce that most crippling of thoughts: ‘I do not belong here.'” But it is not “out of touch with reality” to conclude that racial preferences may themselves have the debilitating effect of reinforcing precisely that doubt, and-if so-that the preferences do more harm than good. To disagree with the dissent’s views on the costs and benefits of racial preferences is not to “wish away, rather than confront” racial inequality. People can disagree in good faith on this issue, but it similarly does more harm than good to question the openness and candor of those on either side of the debate. Both opinions are worth reading. And read more about them in The Weekend Read.

Pope Francis I has declared two prior popes Saints. One is well known, Pope John Paul II. But Pope John XXIII is perhaps forgotten by many. As NPR reports, “John XXIII, also known as ‘Good Pope John,’ was nearly 77 at his coronation and, because of his advanced age, was widely regarded as a ‘stopgap’ pope who wasn’t going to make waves. Instead, he called the Vatican II Council, which promulgated one of the most far-reaching and controversial reforms in the Roman Catholic Church’s history.” John XXIII also published a little book Journal of a Soul, which Hannah Arendt reviewed for the New York Review of Books. For the Jewish thinker, Good Pope John is a Christian Pope, one of the few. Arendt tells of a “Roman chambermaid” in a hotel who asked her, in all innocence: “Madam,” she said, “this Pope was a real Christian. How could that be? And how could it happen that a true Christian would sit on St. Peter’s chair? Didn’t he first have to be appointed Bishop, and Archbishop, and Cardinal, until he finally was elected to be Pope? Had nobody been aware of who he was?” Arendt had a simple answer for the maid. “No.” She writes that Pope John was largely unknown upon his selection and arrived as an outsider. He was, in the words of her title, a true Christian living in the spirit of Jesus Christ. In a sense, this was so surprising in the midst of the 20th century that no one had imagined it to be possible, and the Good Pope John was selected without anyone knowing who he was. On the day of Pope John XXIII’s Sainthood, it is worth revisiting Arendt’s full review.

Taking Hannah Arendt’s quote, “There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous,” as its starting point, the Canadian Public Radio show Ideas with Paul Kennedy explores Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. The program features Roger Berkowitz, Adam Gopnik, Adam Kirsch, and Rivka Galchen. The conversation was heated at times, but overall offers a good account of Arendt’s book, her thoughts on thinking, and the reason her thought matters. Take some time to listen to program.

Patricia Lockwood, at the Poetry Foundation blog, seems to be tired of being asked if poetry is work: “IS it work, though? The question persists. Is a single muscle exerted during the process? Do you sweat at all, besides the weird thing that sometimes happens under your right arm because you haven’t lifted it up for 8 hours? Do you get to retire after you work at it faithfully for 50 years? The answers are no, no, and no. Can anyone fire a poet? Only Death can fire a poet.” She is, of course, making a joke. For Arendt, though, poetry, and art more generally, is in fact work. Indeed, making art may be the last vestige of work in a world where the primary activity of life has become the repetitive, never ending, activity of consumption, in which nothing is left behind and all labor seeks only to further the process of consumption. Poetry, and painting, and art are outliers in the modern world to the extent they leave something behind and resist the process of consumption.

“So far, the year 2014 has been a tumultuous one, as geopolitical rivalries have stormed back to center stage. Whether it is Russian forces seizing Crimea, China making aggressive claims in its coastal waters, Japan responding with an increasingly assertive strategy of its own, or Iran trying to use its alliances with Syria and Hezbollah to dominate the Middle East, old-fashioned power plays are back in international relations.” Walter Russell Mead believes that geopolitics, never really gone, is back for good: “Westerners should never have expected old-fashioned geopolitics to go away. They did so only because they fundamentally misread what the collapse of the Soviet Union meant: the ideological triumph of liberal capitalist democracy over communism, not the obsolescence of hard power. China, Iran, and Russia never bought into the geopolitical settlement that followed the Cold War, and they are making increasingly forceful attempts to overturn it. That process will not be peaceful, and whether or not the revisionists succeed, their efforts have already shaken the balance of power and changed the dynamics of international politics.

On the occasion of the publication of a biography of the author, Hermione Lee describes what John Updike was up to: “As he said of himself… he is the artist of middleness, ordinariness, in-betweenness, who famously wanted ‘to give the mundane its beautiful due.’ For over half a century-even though his own life moved far away from ‘middleness’;-he transformed everyday America into lavishly eloquent and observant language. This-even more than his virtuoso writing about sex, his close readings of adultery and husbandly guilt, his tracking of American social politics, his philosophizing on time and the universe-is his great signature tune. No wonder that some of the narrators in his stories are archaeologists, or that he’s so interested in vanished cities, ancient civilizations, and extinct species.”

On the 450th birthday of William Shakespeare, Bob Duggan remembers that what are understood as his great contributions now were not his most well known plays during his life: “During Shakespeare’s own lifetime he was known best as the “honey-tongued” poet of such works as Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, in which he used classical and ancient characters to his own artistic purposes as well as practical purposes of making money during the plague-forced theater closures of 1593-1594. Readers literally read published copies of these works to pieces, making surviving copies extremely rare today. People went to see the plays, of course, but the emphasis of the theaters was on making money as much as making art.”

Eric Hoover, in an essay about the ways that colleges and universities may begin to evaluate students, describes one measure designed to quantify the information in a recommendation: “Motivated by such findings, the Educational Training Service developed an online rating tool called the Personal Potential Index. Designed to quantify what’s conveyed in a recommendation, it asks past instructors to rate students on a five-point scale in six categories: communication skills, ethics and integrity, knowledge and creativity, planning and organization, resilience, and teamwork. To gauge resilience, for instance, respondents are asked to what extent a student ‘accepts feedback without getting defensive; works well under stress; can overcome challenges and setbacks; works extremely hard’. Recommenders can type in comments to elaborate on their ratings, if they choose.” Adding comments, of course, is not the same thing as real qualitative assessment; perhaps, instead of attempting to replace the tests, institutions of higher education should abandon that requirement altogether, and instead evaluate students as students, rather than as data.

This week on the blog we revisit Tracy Strong’s Quote of the Week on “Thinking Without Bannisters.” And in the Weekend Read, Roger Berkowitz looks at the relation of race, democracy, and the constitution in Schuette decision.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

In 2010, Mohamed Sakr was stripped of his British citizenship. “Seventeen months later,” the NY Times reports, “an American drone streaked out of the sky in the Lower Shabelle region of Somalia and killed Mr. Sakr. An intelligence official quoted in news reports called him a “very senior Egyptian,” though he never held an Egyptian passport. A childhood friend of Mr. Sakr, Bilal al-Berjawi, a Lebanese-Briton also stripped of his citizenship by the British government, was killed in a drone strike a month earlier, after having escaped an attack in June 2011. The cases of Mr. Sakr and Mr. Berjawi are among the most significant relating to the British government’s growing use of its ability to strip citizenship and its associated rights from some Britons at the stroke of a pen, without any public hearing and with only after-the-fact involvement by the courts. Now, faced with concerns that the steady stream of British Muslims traveling to fight in Syria could pose a threat on their return, Prime Minister David Cameron’s government is pushing legislation that would give it additional flexibility to use the power, which among other things keeps terrorism suspects from re-entering the country.” The sovereign right of a nation to control who is nationalized or denationalized is unchallenged, and yet in practice the rise of mass denationalization first emerged in Europe in the 1930s. For Hannah Arendt, it is a truism that “One is almost tempted to measure the degree of totalitarian infection by the extent to which the concerned governments use their sovereign right of denationalization.” This does not mean that Britain is teetering toward totalitarianism. All countries make use of denationalization to some extent. And yet, the normalization of the practice of depriving some people of their status as citizens does not deprive them simply of rights, but also leaves them fully outside the sphere of organized human society. They lack not the right to a trial or the right to speak, but the right to have rights as a member of human society. Mass denationalization is a dangerous road.

Self-described rationalist and atheist Barbara Ehrenreich, who is also a scientist by training, is interviewed about her new book Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth About Everything on NPR. She recounts one of the mystical experiences she had as a teenager in the Mojave Desert: “It was – the only words I can put to it after all these years are that the world flamed into life. Everything was alive. It was like there was a feeling of an encounter with something living, not something God-like, not something loving, not something benevolent, but something beyond any of those kinds of categories, beyond any human categories.” This book, Ehrenreich says, marks the first time she has spoken to anyone about these experiences. “…I think I have a responsibility to report things, even if they’re anomalous, even if they don’t fit whatever theory I had in my mind or most people have or anything. So it’s in that spirit that I take this risk…Now I’m getting responses from people and I’m talking about serious people, serious rational actually nonbelievers, people I know through my work, as well as total strangers who pop up and say, that is so much like my experience.”

In an interview, Mary Szybist, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for poetry, discusses the relationship between her prayer and her chosen medium: “When I was young, I reached a point where I found myself unable to pray. I was devastated by it. I missed being able to say words in my head that I believed could be heard by a being, a consciousness outside me. That is when I turned to poetry. I have always been attracted to apostrophe, perhaps because of its resemblance to prayer. A voice reaches out to something beyond itself that cannot answer it. I find that moving in part because it enacts what is true of all address and communication on some level—it cannot fully be heard, understood, or answered. Still, some kinds of articulations can get us closer to such connections—connections between very different consciousnesses—and I think the linguistic ranges in poetry can enable that.”

Only a few days prior to author and naturalist Peter Matthiessen’s death last week, the New York Times Magazine published a profile of him in honor of In Paradise, Matthiessen’s final book. That novel springs from an experience that the author had during a Zen Buddhist retreat held at Auschwitz; one night, the group fell into dance, a profoundly divisive act, not, perhaps, that different from holding a meditation retreat in a German death camp. A few nights later, responding both to the dancing and to the retreat as a whole, Mattheiessen spoke: “I just got up and made a generality that if we think the Germans are unique in this regard, we’re crazy. We’re all capable of this, if the right buttons are pressed. Our countries have all done it. Man has been a murderer forever…It was no great manifesto up there. I just wanted to say, ‘Come on, we’re all in this together.’” There is, however, a non-minimal difference between those who might have participated in the Final Solution if given the chance and those who did so. To say we are all guilty is to say that no one is, as Arendt never tired of pointing out. I would like to think Mattheiessen knew he was just mouthing a “generality,” as he said.

Paul Sagar reviews Bernard Williams’ posthumous collection of essays and reviews. Sagar praises the therapeutic impact of the seriousness of Williams’ public thinking, which may “teach and urge patience regarding the long span of time that is required to acquire, process, and then develop knowledge and ideas. This in turn can have a calming effect, balancing the sense of being overwhelmed by the vast amount that there is to know before one can even come close to saying something worth saying.” Indeed, Williams is one of those few public thinkers who, in the tradition of Hannah Arendt, elevate public discourse by the force of their example. In other words, Williams insists that philosophy remain a humanist rather than a scientific project. “Williams urged that philosophy must be a humanistic discipline. Many analytic philosophers proceed as though the sheer force of their cleverness can scythe through deep problems of human living and understanding, unaided and unencumbered by further learning and knowledge. This attitude frequently goes along with a willful philistinism: a celebration of one’s ignorance beyond one’s academic niche, within which one prowls to do battle with the more or less clever as they dare come forth. Williams’s work stands as an indictment of this way of going about philosophy. He shows that it is most certainly an intellectual mistake. But it is also an ethical one, insofar as we rightfully find ignorance repellant and its celebration a vice. The richness and value of human experience must extend beyond being merely clever, if our lives are to have that dimension of meaning which philosophy, of all disciplines, should surely put first and foremost (the clue, after all, is in the name).”

The NY Times offers pictures of reconciliation, putting faces and bodies to relationships such as this one: “NZABAMWITA: “I damaged and looted her property. I spent nine and a half years in jail. I had been educated to know good from evil before being released. And when I came home, I thought it would be good to approach the person to whom I did evil deeds and ask for her forgiveness. I told her that I would stand by her, with all the means at my disposal. My own father was involved in killing her children. When I learned that my parent had behaved wickedly, for that I profoundly begged her pardon, too.” KAMPUNDU: “My husband was hiding, and men hunted him down and killed him on a Tuesday. The following Tuesday, they came back and killed my two sons. I was hoping that my daughters would be saved, but then they took them to my husband’s village and killed them and threw them in the latrine. I was not able to remove them from that hole. I knelt down and prayed for them, along with my younger brother, and covered the latrine with dirt. The reason I granted pardon is because I realized that I would never get back the beloved ones I had lost. I could not live a lonely life — I wondered, if I was ill, who was going to stay by my bedside, and if I was in trouble and cried for help, who was going to rescue me? I preferred to grant pardon.”” Arendt relates reconciliation to Amor Mundi, to love the world. Reconciliation, she writes, “has its origin in a self-coming to terms with what has been given to one.” The act of loving the world as it is re-imagines one’s solidarity in the face of a wrong that threatens to dissolve that common sense of belonging to a world, even a world that harbors horrific wrongs. In this sense, reconciliation is the judgment that in spite of our plurality and differences, we share a common world.

I attended my first Mets game of the season last Sunday, with my daughter. She is learning to watch the whole field, to note where the outfielders shift against right and left handed hitters and when her favorite player, David Wright, covers the line at third. Baseball is a game of pauses that can be filled with strategy, conversation, and hot dogs. Basking in the glory of the beginning of a new season of hope, I was thrilled to come across a short letter by John Rawls extolling seven virtues of baseball. Here are the first two. “First: the rules of the game are in equilibrium: that is, from the start, the diamond was made just the right size, the pitcher’s mound just the right distance from home plate, etc., and this makes possible the marvelous plays, such as the double play. The physical layout of the game is perfectly adjusted to the human skills it is meant to display and to call into graceful exercise. Whereas, basketball, e.g., is constantly (or was then) adjusting its rules to get them in balance. Second: the game does not give unusual preference or advantage to special physical types, e.g., to tall men as in basketball. All sorts of abilities can find a place somewhere, the tall and the short etc. can enjoy the game together in different positions.”

The response has been swift and negative to the Rolling Stone Magazine cover—a picture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev who with his now dead brother planted deadly homemade bombs near the finish-line of the Boston Marathon. The cover features a picture Tsarnaev himself posted on his Facebook page before the bombing. It shows him as he wanted himself to be seen—that itself has offended many, who ask why he is not pictured as a suspect or convict. In the photo he is young, hip, handsome, and cool. He could be a rock star, and given the context of the Rolling Stone cover, that is how he appears.

The cover is jarring, and that is intended. It is controversial, and that was probably also intended. Hundreds of thousands of comments on Facebook and around the web are critical and angry, asking how Rolling Stone could portray the bomber as a rock-star. They overlook or ignore the text accompanying the photo on the cover, which reads: “The Bomber. How a Popular, Promising Student Was Failed by His Family, Fell Into Radical Islam, and Became a Monster.” CVS and other retailers have announced they will not sell the magazine in their stores.

That is unfortunate, for the story written by Janet Reitman is exceptionally good and deserves to be read.

Controversies like this have a perverse effect. Just as the furor over Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem resulted in the viral dissemination of her claims about the Jewish leaders, so too will this Rolling Stone cover be seen by millions of people who otherwise would never have heard of Rolling Stone. What is more, such publicity makes it ever less likely that the story itself will be read seriously, just as Arendt’s book was criticized by everyone, but read by few.

Reitman’s narrative itself is unexceptional. It is a common story line: young, normal kid becomes radicalized and does something none of his old friends can believe he could do. This is a now familiar narrative that we hear in the wake of the tragedies in Newtown (Adam Lanza was described as a nice quiet kid) and Columbine (Time’s cover announced “The Monsters Next Door.”)

This is also the narrative that Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana embraced to defend the Cover on NPR arguing it was an “apt image because part of what the story is about is what an incredibly normal kid [Tsarnaev] seemed like to those who knew him best back in Cambridge.” It was echoed too by Erin Burnett, on CNN, who recently invoked Hannah Arendt’s idea of the “banality of evil.” In the easy frame the story offers, Tsarnaev was a good kid, part of a striving immigrant family, someone who loved multi-racial America. And then something went wrong. He found Islam; his family fell apart; and he became a monster.

This story is too simple. And yet within the Rolling Stone story, there is a wealth of information and reporting that does give a nuanced and thoughtful portrayal of Tsarnaev’s journey into the heart of evil.

One fact that is important to note is that Tsarnaev is not Eichmann. Eichmann was a member of the SS, a nationalist security service engaged in world war and dedicated to wiping certain races of peoples off the face of the earth. He committed genocide as part of a system of extermination, something both worse than and yet less messy than murder itself. It is Tsarnaev, who had no state apparatus behind him, who become a cold-blooded murderer. The problems that Hannah Arendt thought that the court in Jerusalem faced with Eichmann—that he was a new type of criminal—do not apply in Tsarnaev’s case. He is a murderer. To understand him is not to understand a new type of criminal. And yet it is a worthy endeavor to try to understand why more and more young men like Tsarnaev are so easily radicalized and drawn to murdering innocent people in the name of a cause.

Both Eichmann and Tsarnaev were from upwardly striving bourgeois families that struggled with economic setbacks. Eichmann was white and Austrian, Tsarnaev an immigrant in Cambridge, but both were economically disaffected. Tsarnaev wanted to make money and, like his parents, dreamed of a better life.

Tsarnaev’s family had difficulty fitting in with U.S. culture. His father was ill and could not work. His mother sought to earn money. And his older brother, whom he idolized, saw his dreams of Olympic boxing dashed partly because he was not a citizen. He increasingly turned to a radical version of Islam. When Tsarnaev’s parents both returned to Dagestan, he fell increasingly under the influence of his older brother.

Like Eichmann, Tsarnaev appears to have adopted an ideology that provided a coherent and meaningful narrative that gave his life significance. One can see this in a number of tweets and statements that are quoted in the article. For example, just before the bombing, he tweeted:

“Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.”

“If you have the knowledge and the inspiration all that’s left is to take action.”

“Most of you are conditioned by the media.”

Like Eichmann, Tsarnaev came to see himself as a hero, someone willing to suffer and even die for a noble cause. His cause was different—anti-American jihad instead of anti-Semitic Nazism—but he was an ideological idealist, a joiner, someone who found meaning and importance in belonging to a movement. A smart and talented and by most accounts good young man, he was lost and adrift, searching for someone and something to give his life purpose. He found that someone in his brother and that something in jihad against America, the land that previously he had so embraced. And he became someone who believed that what he was doing was right and necessary, even if he understood also that it was wrong.

We see clearly this ambivalent understanding of right and wrong in the note Tsarnaev apparently scrawled while he was hiding in a boat before he was captured. Here is how Reitman’s article describes what he wrote:

When investigators finally gained access to the boat, they discovered a jihadist screed scrawled on its walls. In it, according­ to a 30-count indictment handed down in late June, Jihad [Tsarnaev’s nickname] appeared to take responsibility for the bombing, though he admitted he did not like killing innocent people. But “the U.S. government is killing our innocent civilians,” he wrote, presumably referring to Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I can’t stand to see such evil go unpunished. . . . We Muslims are one body, you hurt one, you hurt us all,” he continued, echoing a sentiment that is cited so frequently by Islamic militants that it has become almost cliché. Then he veered slightly from the standard script, writing a statement that left no doubt as to his loyalties: “Fuck America.”

Eichmann too spoke of his shock and disapproval of killing innocent Jews, but he justified doing so for the higher Nazi cause. He also said that when he found out about the sufferings of Germans at the hands of the allies, it made it easier for him to justify what he had done, because he saw it as equivalent. The fact that the Germans were aggressors, that they had started the war, and that they were killing and torturing innocent people simply did not register for Eichmann, just as it did not register for Tsarnaev that the people in the Boston marathon were innocent. There are, of course, innocent people in Iraq and Afghanistan who have died at the hands of U.S. bombs. Even for those of us who were against the wars and question their sense and justification, however, there is a difference between death in a war zone and terrorism.

The Rolling Stone article does a good job of chronicling Tsarnaev’s slide into a radical jihadist ideology, one mixed with conspiracy theories.

The Prophet Muhammad, he noted on Twitter, was now his role model. “For me to know that I am FREE from HYPOCRISY is more dear to me than the weight of the ENTIRE world in GOLD,” he posted, quoting an early Islamic scholar. He began following Islamic Twitter accounts. “Never underestimate the rebel with a cause,” he declared.

His rebellious cause was to awaken Americans to their complicity both in the bombing of innocent Muslims and also to his belief in the common conspiracy theory that America was behind the 9/11 attacks. In one Tweet he wrote: “Idk [I don’t know] why it’s hard for many of you to accept that 9/11 was an inside job, I mean I guess fuck the facts y’all are some real #patriots #gethip.”

Besides these tweets that offer a provocative insight into Tsarnaev’s emergent ideological convictions, the real virtue of the article is its focus on Tsarnaev’s friends, his school, and his place in American youth culture. While his friends certainly do not support or condone what Tsarnaev did, many share some of his conspiratorial and anti-American beliefs. Here are two descriptions of the mainstream nature of many of his beliefs:

To be fair, Will and others note, Jahar’s perspective on U.S. foreign policy wasn’t all that dissimilar from a lot of other people they knew. “In terms of politics, I’d say he’s just as anti-American as the next guy in Cambridge,” says Theo.

This is not an uncommon belief. Payack, who [was Tsarnaev’s wrestling coach and mentor and] also teaches­ writing at the Berklee College of Music, says that a fair amount of his students, notably those born in other countries, believe 9/11 was an “inside job.” Aaronson tells me he’s shocked by the number of kids he knows who believe the Jews were behind 9/11. “The problem with this demographic is that they do not know the basic narratives of their histories – or really any narratives,” he says. “They’re blazed on pot and searching the Internet for any ‘factoids’ that they believe fit their highly de-historicized and decontextualized ideologies. And the adult world totally misunderstands them and dismisses them – and does so at our collective peril,” he adds.

The article presents a sad portrait of youth culture, and not just because all these “normal” kids are smoking “a copious amount of weed.” The jarring realization is that these talented and intelligent young people at a good school in a storied neighborhood come off so disaffected. What is more, their beliefs in conspiracies are accepted by the adults in their lives as commonplaces; their anti-Americanism is simply a noted fact; and their idolization of slacking (Tsarnaev’s favorite word, his friends say, “was “sherm,” Cambridge slang for ‘slacker’”) is seen as cute. There is painfully little concern by adults to insist that the young people face facts and confront unserious opinions.

In short, the young people in Tsarnaev’s story appear to be abandoned by adults to their own youthful and quite fanciful views of reality. Youth culture dominates, and adult supervision seems absent. There is seemingly no one who, in Arendt’s language from “The Crisis in Education”, takes responsibility for teaching them to love the world as it is.

The Rolling Stone article and cover do not glorify a monster; but they do play on two dangerous trends in modern culture that Hannah Arendt worried about in her writing: First, the rise of youth culture and the abandonment of adult authority in education; and second, the fascination bourgeois culture has for vice and the short distance that separates an acceptance of vice from an acceptance of monstrosity. If only all the people who are so concerned about a magazine cover today were more concerned about the delusions and fantasies of Tsarnaev, his friends, and others like them.

Taking responsibility for teaching young people to love the world is the very essence of what Arendt understands education to be. It will be the topic of the Hannah Arendt Center upcoming conference “Failing Fast: The Crisis of the Educated Citizen.” Registration for the conference opened this week. For now, ignore the controversy and read Reitman’s article “Jahar’s World.” It is your weekend read. It is as good an argument for thinking seriously about the failure of our approach to education as one can find.

As a regular faculty member for the Bard Prison Initiative, I can attest that one of the most appealing aspects of working with incarcerated students is their wide-ranging curiosity and perceptiveness. The men I know are eager to discuss topics that both deepen and expand the content of their classes, and they are quick to draw connections between their classes and current events. Their ability to make these links has a lot to do with the avid, even voracious attention many of them pay to the news on N.P.R., the major television networks, and almost any publication they can get their hands on. Such interest is a matter of both intellectual and existential significance: as a few of my students have related to me, the news offers one way to relieve their sense of isolation and to maintain a modicum of contact with “life in the street.” But their ability to draw connections also depends on an expansive moral and political imagination, one that consistently relates distant happenings to the details of their own lives.

A few weeks ago the students in “Migration and Diaspora in Global Perspective,” the class I am now teaching at Eastern New York Correctional Facility, wanted to know my thoughts on Palestine’s recent elevation to nonmember observer status at the U.N. The onslaught of questions began almost from the moment I entered the classroom. How would the vote change relations between Israel, Hamas, and the Palestinian Authority? Would the Palestinians be able to challenge Israel’s military incursions and settlement policies in ways that were not available to them before? Why did the U.S. oppose Palestine’s observer status when so many other states in the General Assembly favored it? How should we interpret Germany’s decision to abstain? And just how significant was this vote anyway? Was it a merely symbolic gesture, or would it have a real and decisive impact on the future?

I was not entirely surprised by the students’ interest, and I suspect that our class was responsible for at least a bit of it. Not long before, we had spent the day watching and discussing Cherien Dabis’s debut feature film Amreeka (2009), which traces the journey of a Palestinian mother and son from their home in Bethlehem to an Illinois suburb. The film’s U.S. distributor, National Geographic Entertainment, has marketed it as a classic immigration story, and the packaging for the DVD plays on well-worn themes of new arrivals’ disorientation, homesickness, and gradual adjustment. But the film also draws on Dabis’s own childhood memories in Omaha, Nebraska to cast an all-too-knowing eye on American life during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and two key scenes deftly portray the power dynamics that unfold daily at Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank and Gaza. Beneath the anodyne surface, then, Amreeka packs a subversive punch, and my students appreciated its shrewd take on both the Israeli occupation and the U.S. War on Terror.

But my class is hardly the only reason why they are concerned about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A few of the students feel a degree of personal connection to ongoing events in the region because they were born and raised as Jews or because they converted later in life to Judaism or Islam. Others adopt a more distanced perspective but nevertheless regard the conflict as a pivotal geopolitical impasse about which they should, as informed students and citizens, have some knowledge.

And still others interpret the conflict as an almost paradigmatic instance of injustice, one that crystallizes the colonial legacies, entrenched political interests, and enduring economic disparities that define our contemporary world.

Moreover, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict resonates strongly with many of the students’ own experiences of stigmatization and hyper-visibility on ethnic and racial grounds. In one way or another, virtually all of the African American and Latino students in my class—and they represent the overwhelming majority—can relate to the profiling, ID checks, body and vehicle searches, and policing of space that are an integral part of the Israeli occupation. Many of them can also sympathize with Palestinians’ more general condition of disenfranchisement, their desire for “a place in the world which makes opinions significant and actions effective” (to invoke an evocative phrase from Hannah Arendt). In many instances, they cultivate such sympathy by drawing metaphorical links with their own histories and memories of exclusion.

On the basis of such connections, many of the students in my classes (and the Bard Prison Initiative more broadly) take a keen interest in struggles for cultural and political change in other parts of the world. They respond strongly to readings and films that deal not simply with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also with apartheid in South Africa and the Troubles in Northern Ireland. At the same time, they display considerable curiosity—and not a little generosity—toward other groups that adopt and re-work political traditions and cultural practices they typically claim as “their own.” For example, African American students are often struck by the ways that Northern Irish Catholics adopted elements of the civil rights movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and they display a good deal of appreciation for the manner that Palestinian youth take up the aesthetics of hip-hop for their own purposes today. They do not typically claim exclusive ownership over these cultural and political formations, and they do not condemn moments of cross-cultural appropriation as illegitimate poaching or theft (although, I must admit, it can take a moment to digest white Irish Catholics singing “We Shall Overcome”).

I welcomed the questions the students posed that day, and I worked hard to answer them as best I could. But I was also aware of the distinct challenge they posed to me as a teacher and fellow observer of the world. How could I convey my own understanding of the recent U.N. vote while also acknowledging the lingering uncertainties and disagreements that it inevitably reflected? How could I draw attention to the complexities of the current conflict and not merely confirm, in an uncritical way, the sympathy that most of the students already felt for the Palestinian cause? And how could I suggest that we should be thoughtful about the connections we draw between other people’s experiences and our own?

I, for one, am acutely aware that I cannot facilely equate my own societal positioning and life history with those of my students. Are there limits on the imaginative links we might forge with people in other times and places?

Our discussion that day barely scratched the surface of these larger issues. But I left it with a new appreciation for both the difficulty and the importance of this kind of candid conversation. As challenging as it might be, such exchange is significant precisely because it bridges the political and the personal, the distant and the close-at-hand.

In light of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s recent and untimely passing, we thought it would be appropriate to post two different clips of her speaking about Hannah Arendt. Young-Bruehl was, of course, a student of Arendt as well as her biographer.

The first is an NPR interview from 2006 which marked what would have been Hannah Arendt’s 100th birthday. While Young-Bruehl addressed Arendt’s writings about Eichmann and the banality of evil, she also discussed Arendt’s thoughts on McCarthyism and her fear of close-minded thinking in the United States:

But she, of course, was more worried as the 1950s went on about the implications of the way in which America and its allies opposed Stalin. She was as concerned about this as she was about the Stalinist regime.

Then she was most worried there had come about in America a kind of frame of mind that was quite rigid and obsessional itself, and Joseph McCarthy was the exemplar of this, that found any means to justify the end of anti-communism reasonable.

The second piece, considerably longer, is a lecture Young-Bruehl delivered at an April, 2010 Conference on Hannah Arendt. Her lecture is entitled, “The Promise of Hannah Arendt’s Politics.” One of the topics she discussed was Arendt’s Post WWII perception of cosmpolitanism and the negative impact of statelessness:

While efforts were being made after the War toward a world politics, a politics in which states could put their resources to the world concerns they shared, working for world peace, intellectuals of various backgrounds were considering the meaning of cosmopolitanism in that historical moment –a window of opportunity before the so-called Cold War gripped the world. In 2002, looking back on this post-war moment …two British political theorists, Fine and Cohen, contributing to an essay collection called Conceiving Cosmopolitanism, named the moment “Arendt’s moment.” Hannah Arendt had offered an analysis of “crimes against humanity” that was, they argued, defining of the moment.

By concentrating their attention on Arendt’s thoughts about international law and the 1945 Nuremberg Trials, Fine and Cohen overlooked, I think, the centerpiece of Hannah Arendt’s cosmopolitanism, which was her critique of the late 19th and 20th century sovereign nation-states, which, she emphasized, were states that had turned on groups of their own people, eliminating some and creating wave upon wave of stateless others.

No leaders … had, in Hannah Arendt’s estimation, grasped fully the key stumbling block to any harmonious world organization of nation-states and any Universal Declaration of Human Rights: the problem of statelessness.

On a weekday morning of last week, while listening to National Public Radio, I first encountered the notion of Dignity Therapy. The concept is used by psychiatrists and seeks to soothe those who are dying, to aid them in coping with the realities of their impending death. The therapy consists of individuals writing the story of their lives’ joys, tragedies, memorable moments, etc. The autobiographies are how they want to be perceived, thus when they are gone, their loved ones will have the story of the memorable and significant events in the lives of the dear ones.

Aida Essenburg with her daughter Kate Fredo

In thinking of such a therapy, notions of human condition are brought to light: namely that we as humans want to feel connected, and that the truth about the events of our lives may change over time, in the face of time, and depending on how we wish to remember them. The nature of dignity therapy fascinates those most closely connected to studying the human condition: psychiatrists. As scholars seeking to understand the ideas posited by Hannah Arendt we must consider the nature of memory and narrative. We must ask: what are purposes of remembering those with whom you share human condition? What are the truths and untruths inherent in remembering, and ultimately what is it that we value about our human condition?

On a weekday morning of last week, while listening to National Public Radio, I first encountered the notion of Dignity Therapy. The concept is used by psychiatrists and seeks to soothe those who are dying, to aid them in coping with the realities of their impending death. The therapy consists of individuals writing the story of their lives’ joys, tragedies, memorable moments, etc. The autobiographies are how they want to be perceived, thus when they are gone, their loved ones will have the story of the memorable and significant events in the lives of the dear ones.

In thinking of such a therapy, notions of human condition are brought to light: namely that we as humans want to feel connected, and that the truth about the events of our lives may change over time, in the face of time, and depending on how we wish to remember them. The nature of dignity therapy fascinates those most closely connected to studying the human condition: psychiatrists. As scholars seeking to understand the ideas posited by Hannah Arendt we must consider the nature of memory and narrative. We must ask: what are purposes of remembering those with whom you share human condition? What are the truths and untruths inherent in remembering, and ultimately what is it that we value about our human condition?

Dignity therapy has the potential to teach us truths about the lives of our loved ones, even after they are no longer with us. The notion of Truth remains dear to most of us throughout life, yet at our final moments of life, truth becomes an almost necessity for the dying person. The crafting of one’s own narrative is an awe striking moment where each individual is in complete control of her own memory in the eyes of loved ones, therefore the obvious question is raised: do most fictionalize, glorify their lives or tell the truth, even if it is less than flattering?

The program on NPR emphasized how dying individuals choose many ways to view dignity therapy, some seeing it as a chance to ask loved ones for forgiveness, while others saw it as a legacy in which they must shine, or warning against what evils men are capable of committing against their fellow man. The psychiatrist who created the therapy, Harvey Chocinov, had it in mind to ease the transition of death for those who would soon cross the threshold; however, he soon realized it was often the dying who were more comfortable with this thought than those they would leave behind. The truths of the dying were thus reinterpreted by the love ones, and revealed the evolution of the self over time, seen through the eyes of those they loved most.

When Hannah Arendt speaks of trutht elling in one of her greatest essays Truth and Politics, she wants us to consider the impact storytelling has on the human condition of the actor. Arendt believes that only through deeds and actions can we learn in truth, who we are. Therefore a thing like dignity therapy allows the stroyteller and the actor to meld into the same person, and the fact that it is mainly those who know the stroyteller/actor as a loved one, who are the listeners, it makes for a very powerful form of truth. As well as a truth that lasts.

An interestingly Arendtian aspect to this kind process of dignity therapy is consideringwho is qualified to tell their story and why? Are some more qualified than others because of age, social position, or life deeds? Or are all to be included in the chance to form a narrative of their own truth for those they love (ex. the participation of terminally ill children with Leukemia or Cystic Fibrosis in dignity therapy). Throughout her work Arendt speaks of the written word as a preservation of memory. Remembrance carries enormous power for all living within the human condition insofar as the narrative of an individual allows the life deeds to become sources of inspiration for the future, something to be imitated, even surpassed by those fortunate to learn from the words of their loved ones. A piece of writing formed in sessions of dignity therapy can alone save a life from retreating into oblivion or futility.

After listening to the program that morning, like most students my age, I went about my day of classes and found myself lurking on Facebook in the evening. I began to think of ways my generation is affected by technologies of remembrance and narrative after looking at photos on the Facebook memorial page of a close friend of mine who died from Cystic Fibrosis when we were Eighteen. It occurred to me that Facebook is a true example of modern narratives of remembrance, among its many other complicated meanings for my generation.

The most revealing aspect of Dignity Therapy is that insofar as it lives as an ever changing, interpretable document, that lives long after the loved one’s death, it helps move us toward some form of truth. A trend throughout many of Arendt’s writings call for a “reconciliation with reality”, in essence for you to be told your own story, and then face the choice of whether or not you will accept it as reality. Something like dignity therapy provides a factual truth for the individuals who partake in the narrative forming process and even for their loved ones.

The psychiatrist Chocinov admitted there was not conclusive evidence that dignity therapy soothed or relieved the dying of their anxieties, however, it did allow for authority over how we are remembered; as well as a chance to “reconcile ourselves with reality” for the final time. A narrative document of one’s life also provides those with little influence to share their story with the world. Although it is up to the individual to to decide whether or not the document produced in her dignity therapy sessions will be full of truth or deceit, it is fundamentally true that through story and the storyteller, life itself is given meaning.

Toward the end of her essay Truth and Politics, though Arendt notes the limits inherent in a value as contingent as truth; she then goes on to state:

“It is limited by those things which men cannot change at will. And it is only by respecting its own borders that this realm, where we are free to act and change, can remain intact, preserving its integrity and keeping its promises. Conceptually, we may call truth what we cannot change; metaphorically, it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us” (Arendt 259).

In my opinion, anyone can begin dignity therapy at any time in their lives, not just as they are in the process of dying. True that there is more to reflect on in the final days of one’s life, yet as hybrid beings, split beings, we are all imperfect, we all fail. Yet, we all have the capacity for truth, and this bonds us with those who share in our human condition. If the goal of moving toward some form of truth requires that we “reconcile ourselves with reality”, it would seem that it is never too late, nor too early to begin this personal journey; to think what we are doing.